by Tobin M. Hansen

The U.S. government’s restrictionist immigration policies, both before the election of Donald Trump and currently, affect access to education in unexpected ways. DREAMers—undocumented childhood arrivals—become socially and culturally embedded in the fabric of local communities and the nation, yet are often denied political and legal recognition and blocked from accessing public goods such as postsecondary education. But what of childhood arrivals who become long-time U.S. residents under another name, so-called criminal aliens? After incarceration in U.S. prisons and deportation, they also are among those whose hopes for additional schooling become stymied.

In the age of Trump and of reinvigorated xenophobic, racist, and nativist tropes—of bad hombres, Mexican rapists, and “illegals” who murder and traffic drugs—symbols of social identity and achievement, including education, are at heightened risk of becoming weaponized in media and political discourse. The Trumpian conjuring of criminal aliens, threatening figures creeping northward through hostile U.S.–Mexico borderlands, reinforces misguided notions of the menace these figures pose while ignoring the fullness of their personhood.

The Trump effect on noncitizens of the United States is marked not only by disruption, as with Muslim bans and the expansion of expedited removal, but also by intensification and continuity. Steadily built up over decades, the government’s robust deportation machinery continues to grind along. But the rise of Trump should animate us as scholars to ask novel questions and make unanticipated connections. What are the consequences of deporting longtime resident criminal aliens, for example, with respect to opportunities for formal study? And what might deportees’ experiences suggest about punitive immigration enforcement, social belonging, and the valuation of noncitizens’ lives?

Nogales is one of five Mexican border cities that received at least 20,000 deportees in 2016. Many of the deported criminal aliens I work with there through long-term ethnographic engagement have antinormative identities—as drug users, gang members, and former prison inmates—that marginalized them in the United States and now in Mexico. In Nogales, they navigate unfamiliar social and spatial geographies, become separated from family and, as ostracized pochos (“Americanized” Mexicans), face interpersonal violence, difficulty finding work, and extortion by corrupt police. The incitements of life in this liminal place often take precedence over continued education.

Yet despite this precariousness, as they reconceptualize their selfhood after displacement from home in the United States, some deportees express an interest in further study. Most did not complete high school in the United States, but many took courses in prison and for some, now in their twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties, high-school equivalency or other schooling is an aspiration. The difficulties they counter are not for want of institutions. Nogales is home to multiple preparatorias abiertas and a colegio de bachilleres, which offer high-school equivalency self-study and test-taking as well as classes on weeknights and weekends. Diplomas earned in institutions like these, which are backed by Mexico’s Department of Education, are often a prerequisite for white- and pink-collar jobs and even some kinds of vocational employment. Nogales also has five options for postsecondary education: two private technological institutes, a public liberal arts and sciences university, a nursing school, and an elite private college.

The Enrique Pestalozzi public school in Nogales. Photo by Tobin Hansen.

Still, deportees’ criminalized, working-class U.S. Latino identities demarcate them as peculiar, if not unfit, students within Mexican adult-education systems, compounding the difficulties they face at the level of fees for matriculation and course materials. Even when access is granted, their success may be confounded by an unfamiliarity with the ideological bent of curricula and pedagogical practices or by the requirements for testing and completion. The greatest obstacle, however, may be language. While some deported childhood arrivals have advanced competency as heritage speakers of Spanish, the majority do not. And very few have the Spanish proficiency to keep up with the rigors of coursework at the secondary or postsecondary level.

The ways that deportation curbs educational possibilities include not just the stifling of personal growth and limiting of job prospects in Mexico, but also a symbolic exclusion from U.S. society’s vital educational institutions. In this regard, the deportation regime, perhaps unwittingly, succeeds at prolonging a legacy of attempts to disrupt education: the Lemon Grove Incident that sought to segregate Mexican-American students in the 1930s; California’s Proposition 187, which aimed to bar undocumented students from public schools in the 1990s; and Arizona’s House Bill 2281, which banned ethnic studies courses in the 2010s.

A Mexican border with increasing numbers of longtime U.S. residents seeking to scrape by—some of whom seek educational attainment as an intellectual challenge, a gateway to self-actualization, and a means to occupational mobility—is not the one portrayed by the Trump administration. Its border delusion evokes a treacherous badlands with criminal aliens as its outlaws. In April 2017, Attorney General Jeff Sessions visited Nogales’s homonymous sister city on the Arizona border, a famously safe, low-crime community, taking this caricature of the borderlands to an extreme. Sessions talked about criminal organizations “that turn cities and suburbs into war zones, that rape and kill innocent civilians and who profit by smuggling poison and other human beings across our borders.” On this border, Sessions proclaimed, “we first take our stand against this filth.”

Certainly, white nationalist and xenophobic discourses have circulated in the United States since long before Trump’s rise. Yet his legitimation of such discourses as chief executive and a major party standard-bearer should reinvigorate our commitment as anthropologists to destabilizing assumptions about those who are maligned. Moreover, we would do well to elucidate the unanticipated effects of the Trump administration’s bumbling in crafting exclusionary immigration policies. Meticulous ethnographic practice enables us to contest fantastical caricatures of the U.S.–Mexico borderlands and the disparagement of noncitizens with grounded representations of the places in which people, even so-called criminal aliens, actually live and learn.